And Shakespeare has Lear go on to say:
If it be you that stir these daughters' hearts
Against their father, fool me not so much
To bear it tamely; touch me with noble anger,
And let not women's weapons, water-drops,
Stain my man's cheeks! No, you unnatural hags,
I will have such revenges on you both
That all the world shall -- I will do such things, --
What they are yet I know not, -- but they shall be
The terrors of the earth.
What if the neo-feudal patriarch of the South (Sayyid Qutbs and their "terrors of the earth") has desire, which is indistinguishable from need, for revenge against the bourgeois feminist daughter of the North (Ayaan Hirsi Alis and their imperialism), in a world where the South also grows in the North and vice versa?
Rosa Luxemburg said in The Junius Pamphlet: "Friedrich Engels once said: 'Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.'" Since socialism and anti-imperialism, deprived of the chance to that transition, have become zombie* socialism and zombie anti-imperialism for a majority of people today, it looks like we are standing at a new crossroads, between the barbarism of terrorism and the barbarism of imperialism. Not surprisingly, an increasing number of leftists have forsaken their former faith, which had become living dead anyway long before 9/11, and concluded that they prefer the latter to the former.
We really need a new worldview and practical project for human liberation, which is not trapped by the "nineteenth-century horizons of experience"**: "The third crumbling pillar of the classic perspective is the evolutionary principle. By this I mean the assumption that the West's is the best possible way to organize a society; that its pattern of differentiation is the one all other societies must develop toward if they want to develop at all; and that its future will necessarily be a continuation of its past" (Ulrich Beck and Johannes Willms, Conversations with Ulrich Beck, Trans. Michael Pollak, London: Polity Press, 2004, p.24).
* "Zombie categories embody nineteenth-century horizons of experience, horizons of the first modernity. And because these inappropriate horizons, distilled into a priori and analytic categories, still mold our perceptions, they are blinding us to the real experience and ambiguities of the second modernity" (Ulrich Beck and Johannes Willms, Conversations with Ulrich Beck, Trans. Michael Pollak, London: Polity Press, 2004, p.19).
** Ibid. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>